Finally, the day where I can almost completely avoid visiting MySpace is near!

Myspace has added a long overdue Friends Update notification feature. This feature lets you get updates on when your friends add new photos, add new videos, update their profile, and post blogs(we had this already). I’d love to have the option to know when other people have comments posted on their profiles but I suspect that would invade privacy. I wouldn’t mind it myself, but then again I have no drama or secrets in my comments.

So what does this mean to me? It means I can actually visit MySpace less and yet still know more about my friends profile updates at the same time.

Don’t get me wrong, unlike many people I still like and use MySpace. But I have been using it less and less as time goes on. That is natural. MySpace is showing its age and only growing older by the minute. It’s interface is outdated. They are slowly revamping it but even their “new” interface upgrades leave me disappointed usually. In many cases they are trying to soup up the old interface to look a little prettier while adding features. From a business point of view it makes sense. Go with what has already worked and made you lots of money, try not to alienate your base with any drastic changes, and slowly work towards a better interface generationally if you have to. This means you want it to still feel like the MySpace you know and love (or love to hate). In recent months they have also declared war on the spammers which was my biggest complaint with the site and, as far as I can tell, the war is going well.

However, I selfishly just want them to do a total or much bigger revamp. I know it’s hard with such a complex site with a less than amazing code infrastructure but hey, that’s not my problem! I’d like an interface with a good sleek consistant user interface across the board, more profile customization options like better layout/css options, widgets, applications, etc and tighter intergration with social bookmark sites like Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon or more realistically a new feature that lets users share links in that way.

As a side note, I recently tried Virb and I gotta say… wow, what’s all the fuss about? I was highly disappointed there. No offense to Virb community, but it’s so incomplete and lacks any sort of “pop”. I also visited Ortuk.com and was surprisingly pleased with the way Google always seems to have some of the best usability and interfaces around. Less is more for sure. I ended up on Imeem.com also somehow and it looked very promising but I did not stop to make a profile. Supposedly the fastest growing site of it’s kind currently.

But back to the main topic at hand, I welcome the friends updates from MySpace. I like knowing when my friends have new pictures especially. Knowing when a profile is changed could be nice too especially if that includes both layout coding and information fields. All this without any effort on my part! I hope it actually works!

Now to find a way to exploit it!